On December 8, Major Smith wrote a letter to Colorado State University on Donald’s behalf, blaming what he called Donald’s “acute situational maladjustment” on a freak confluence of bad breaks: his substandard housing situation, his breakup with his girlfriend, and the stress of final examinations. The tone of the major’s letter was generous and reassuring, filled with goodwill. “I agree that his reaction in December when he saw you was quite bizarre,” he wrote. “However, I feel that he has recovered from the incident, has insight into the situation, and to the best of my knowledge will probably not repeat this behavior.”
For a second time in the space of a year, Don and Mimi had secured a scandal-free return to college for their son. The major did not mention Donald’s killing of the cat, or his homicidal fantasies. There was a good reason for this: Major Smith hadn’t been told about any of that. He had never spoken with anyone who had examined Donald at Colorado State. They’d never had the chance to let him know.
Donald, naturally, didn’t volunteer it.
* * *
—
DONALD RETURNED TO Colorado State just after Christmas break. The fruit cellar was a thing of the past. He was out of isolation and back in the world of his classmates again. He kept seeing therapists at the health center, sitting for occasional psychiatric evaluations. After one, his evaluator wrote, “This student is not psychotic.”
Once again, he seemed in a hurry to be all right, to be the son his parents wanted. He was even dating. That spring, he announced that he had met someone new, a successor to his old girlfriend, Marilee. Her name was Jean, and she was tall and broad-shouldered—a tomboy, as Donald once described her. Physically, Jean was a good match for Donald, who was still built like a football player. Like Donald, she was ambitious. She wanted to get a PhD, and Donald still was hoping to become a doctor.
They were together for several months before Donald told his parents that, once again, he was engaged. Mimi and Don were torn. In some small way, they took it as a positive sign that Donald wanted to get started on the rest of his life. They even granted Donald a certain degree of credit for having enough forethought to plan a marriage without a pregnancy forcing the issue. They also knew, from personal experience, that in a situation like this, when you’re young and determined, the objections of your family don’t mean a thing. And Mimi also was, in at least one respect, a little relieved. She and Don had been keeping Donald’s breakdowns secret from the world, hoping that perhaps they could be forgotten. She wanted nothing more than for Donald to right himself. How could she be opposed to the idea—the hope—that Donald might settle down, find direction in life, become predictable, grounded, successful, even happy? Wasn’t this how the story was supposed to go? Boys and girls met and fell in love and got married.
But of course they knew that marriage was a terrible idea. Everyone did. Even beyond his personal problems, the match seemed off for at least one very important reason. Those who knew them warned Donald that Jean was very clear about not wanting children. She wanted to pursue graduate work in genetics and help cure diseases. Children simply weren’t in her plan.
Donald would not listen. The thought of not having a family of his own saddened him so much that he couldn’t believe that what Jean was saying was true.
* * *
—
A FEW MONTHS before the wedding, in May 1967, Donald was in the middle of one of his routine visits to the campus psychiatrist, talking about falcons. Staring at an abstract design on a card, he said that he saw a cliff with a hole in it. Through that hole, he said, there was a nest—a place where he could find newborn birds to take home and make his own.
A mysterious, dark, birth-canal-like passageway, through which Donald could find a new family: The Rorschach test had only just begun, and Donald was already giving the psychiatrist plenty to work with.
He looked at the second image and thought about temptation. He saw a woman ready to have sex with a man, and the man, according to the doctor’s notes from the session, “suffering mental anguish as to whether he should or shouldn’t.” The man finally decided “to keep own values high” and not have sex.
The third picture reminded Donald of a friend of his, a beatnik. “He’s on dope, I guess—he’s unconscious.”
The fourth and fifth made Donald think about a father and a son. He saw a son in bed, and his father coming to say good night. The father, he said, was going to walk out the door. Then he saw a son crying on his father’s shoulder, asking his father for help. The son had done something wrong, Donald said, and the father was going to offer his son some guidance.
When he saw the sixth, all at once a violent drama unfolded in his mind—a man contemplating revenge, and a woman talking him out of it. “He’s half listening and half not,” Donald said.
The seventh, to him, was another revenge scene. This time, a son was avenging his father’s death. The son, he said, “feels right in what he did, because the other person committed injustice to him and his family.”
In the final picture, Donald saw himself.
“I’m climbing up a cliff,” he said. “I’m at the top, and falcons are diving at me.”
DON
MIMI
DONALD
JIM
JOHN
BRIAN
MICHAEL
RICHARD
JOE
MARK
MATT
PETER
MARGARET
MARY
CHAPTER 8
While Donald was struggling at Colorado State, Jim, the maverick second son, spent a year after high school attending classes at a local junior college, rebuilding his academic record. To everyone’s surprise, he did well enough to transfer the next year, 1965, to the University of Colorado at Boulder. It was lost on no one, least of all Jim, that his new college was better than Donald’s. When it came to him and Donald, Jim never stopped keeping score.
Jim was about two years into Boulder—and a fixture at several bars in town—when he met Kathy. He was twenty, and she was nineteen. He spotted her at a dinner-and-dancing club called Giuseppe’s. She was with an old high school friend, and Jim asked to cut in. Then he called her at her parents’ place, where she was living, and they started dating. Early on, Kathy had picked up on the contempt that Jim felt for both of his parents. “They kept having babies and didn’t deal with the younger ones,” he once said. And he would rant about how much he detested his older brother—how Donald had been the big hero in high school, and Jim never really measured up. Now all that seemed to be behind him, she thought, or at least it ought to be.